Thread 717990109

Are the rest of the SMT games worth playing? Because I'm seriously considering dropping this game. I'm 75% through on hard and just cannot take its bullshit anymore. And not in terms of the bosses, I love the bosses, and the core combat mechanics against actually challenging enemies. I wish this game was just a boss rush with select bigger enemies.

By "bullshit" I mean:
>No grinding, my ass. I made it to Matador at level 12. The only demons that can meaningfully counter him at that point are 15-18. He's easy-peasy at that range, just a filter because he's thrown at you at a point where you're almost guaranteed to be piss low level if you're blind.
>Random encounters literally every step, even in safe zones, just to be tedious. I've played a lot of dungeon crawlers with a lot of random encounters, and this is by far the worst. Being accosted five times while just trying to walk back to a cathedral to fuse sucks cocks when you have to do it a million times. It's not challenging, it's like being fucking harassed by an annoying fag. Repulse Bells basically don't do anything either.
>Those fucking puzzle minigames. All I need to say is "those fucking puzzle minigames."

>>717990109 (OP)
Play Vengeance. It's Nocturne's bosses with no random encounters and designed around more boss fights and set encounters.

>>717990109 (OP)
give the touhou clone a try.

>I'm seriously considering dropping the best game in the series
considering the series tops out at a 6/10, no. just move on and accept you got memed.

>"Hey you! Yeah you! Youre a strange looking Demon, I think Ill just rape you to death!"
>[Ok]
>"...! Wait, what? Are you serious? Oh man...kids these days. Look, Ill go with you just to make sure you dont do anything stupid ok? (Geez...)"
>[SNEED RAPEMAN] has joined the party!

SMT V

SMT games were more about the dungeon crawling aspect and slowly and steady abandoned that a little in favor of building and managing boss and miniboss encounters on some clever gimmicks and management of your press turns.
Newer titles have the more modern overworld generic mob that transitions into a battle instead of constant random mobs showing up every 2 steps if you don't use Estoma or something like that.

>>717990252
I'll give it a shot. I hear it doesn't really have any dungeons at all which is sad, sounds like Atlus throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

>>717990497
It has 3 or 4 subzones that could be called "dungeons" but they are more of a bunch of connected corridors following the same aesthetic design. They feel like something like different floors of Tartarus in P3.
I'm not even sure Atlus still does dungeons with all the dark rooms, teleport shit etc. like they did. Maybe the last ones with that were Digital Devil Saga or Strange Journey. Whichever was released last.

>>717990497
The game is structured like a big dungeon tho, like an environment always has seperate rooms and environmental puzzles to navigate them and you have set midbosses at different points blocking your progress to the last boss of the area like you would if you were going through a Nocturne dungeon. The thing that differentiates it from a dungeon crawler is solely not having random encounters.

>>717990692
The castle has the wind paths puzzle like conveyor puzzle, the temple has the one way doors, Shinjuku has the dark room area, Taito has invisible floors, shakan has the inverted gravity, etc.

It's more that these features aren't as relevant in a world without random battles.

>>717990497
It does though, and the world map design is actually really cool. People invoke Dark Souls and Elden Ring for everything, but it really did remind me a lot of that philosophy. A lot of stuff tucked away on ledges or in weird places like rooftops, and then after exploring the level and opening up new routes (there are these rails that take you to remote places, or open shortcuts, and some are secret/hidden) there's a lot of thrill of discovery and "ohhh, that's how I get there!"

>>717990692
>>717990840
>>717991012
Sweet. I'll give it a shot after I'm done with Nocturne, despite being a bitch about it I'm not gonna drop it. I came this far, might as well just pace myself and have a good time with the endgame bosses.

>>717991175
play canon of creation first (don't take the girl's hand), and then play canon of vengeance so you can meet best edgy chaos girl

>>717990109 (OP)
>picks hard in nocturne
>suffers
kinda funny, but you picked this fate. Hard in nocturne goes pretty unfair sometimes.
Someone recommended V:Vengeance and while it's good gameplay-wise, I really don't vibe with the giant desert map and no dungeons. The game had a big 'unfinished' feeling to it with base-release and while V:V is polished, the thing I hoped to get fixed the most (The story, or the lack of it) just kinda had a bandaid thrown over it and it was called a day.
You should try IV as a pallate cleanser before V, it's a much more fleshed out setting at the cost of being on the 3DS. Two giant desert games in a row would tire me out, but you do you
also has dungeons unlike V
If you're feeling Spinoffs then Digital Devil Saga duology is also pure kinematography, along with Soul Hackers (1) and Strange Journey, though the latter two have a bit of a harsher entry for an outsider to the series.

>>717991862
>also has dungeons unlike V


Fake News. The "dungeons" in IV are hot garbage FFXIII hallway simulator shit. The best part of IV is exploring Tokyo which is ironically like Tokyo in V but with a dozens of loading screens

>>717993439
>hallway simulator

>>717990109 (OP)
>hard mode
Don't play on hard mode, especially not for your first run, it's a meme anyways.
>Vengeance
Has dogshit dungeons and is a mediocre game in general.
Just play IV next, or Strange Journey if you like old school dungeon crawlers.

>>717990109 (OP)
Play SMT 4, more of a standard final fantasy RPG though it’s extremely easy past Medusa you can enjoy the storyline and the exploration. No random encounters.


SMT 2 is easy enough that I recommend using repulse bells for most of it honestly so that you don’t stay over-levelled, it’s so easy to get over-levelled that repulse bells will be sure to work, it has a great world and story. Though actually seeing the demons in every area and talking to them actually adds a lot, since talking to the demons does actually add to the wordbuilding for specific ones and they have interesting things to say regardless Not that the encounters are really a problem when you can just auto battle through most of them on fast speed. If you the gameplay doesn’t gell with you just watch it on YouTube, the world and story are worth experiencing

>>717990109 (OP)
filtered.

>>717990109 (OP)
You kept your very first fairy friend right anon? You wouldn't abandon her like some callous jerk right?

The best thing about this game is the auto battle speed.

>>717990109 (OP)
You can stunlock bosses with electric and ice spells in the SNES version of SMT1, and you can use Estoma to turn off encounters if you're stronger than the enemies in the area, so give it a try if you don't mind some old jank. SMT2 has imo the best setting in the series and is 100% worth it if you end up liking 1 since it can also be cheesed with spells and guns

>>717991012
SMT V is designed to be like a Larian game, there is no pressure to conserve your resources between waypoints like a Souls games. Which is why they added save anywhere in Vengeance, cause there's no point in not allowing the players to do that. Because of that there's no dungeon crawling in SMT V, everything is done at your own pace.

>>717994056
Real SMT fans know it's a mix of skill and praying to RNGesus. The skill parts are good, the RNG stuff can uniformly go fuck itself. Doing really well and then dying to a back attack before you press a button is just blatantly unfair. It's like me flipping a coin, and if it lands tails, I'm gonna unplug your console. Won't that make the game so much more challenging?

>>717990109 (OP)
Nocturne only saving points are the designs and the combat, so you have to fight against the rest of the game, oh btw the True Ending is as shit as the others, go for Strange Journey if you want a better Megaten Experience

>>717990109 (OP)
Is it your first SMT? Why did you play it on hard? I think after you beat your first SMT then you can try hard mode. Nocturne is one of the more BS games if you don’t know what to do. Finish Nocturne first. Then play SMT 4, then 4 Apocalypse because they’re fun games with more demons and more quality of life improvements.

For Nocturne you still don’t need to grind but it makes it easier. You can beat Matador at a really low level. The trick is that many of your first recruited demons learn decent skills when they level up just a few levels like the blue ghost doll one can get Sukukaja. Then you fuse more demons and inherit the good skills. Nocturne HD has skill inheritance you can choose making the game trivial. Matador can only use Dekunda but not Dekaja, meaning you can buff yourself as much as you want. He has a move I think Taunt that increases your attack but lowers your defence but that’s about it in terms of him debuffing you. Also Magic has a different buff in this game called Makakaja instead of Tarukaja meaning your magic can be buffed as well as healing spells which is amazing for this fight. Buffs don’t have a time limit in this game and all have ma- by default so Sukukaja buffs all your allies’ evasion you don’t need Masukukaja. I never debuffer Matador because he will eventually remove them and Red Capote will just make him max evasion so I just did 4 Sukukajas to match his evasion. Use 4 Rakukajas and now his physicals barely scratch you even at a low level.

For random encounters yeah they suck especially how in safe places like right outside the cathedral. Raidou had an hd remaster that changed it so you never get encounters in safe zones. It really was just a bad boss. I used my old Raidou strategy guide when playing the new one and it had a Q&A section to the development team. It had a whole paragraph of a developer defending the decision to put random encounters everywhere even in safe places lol.

What did they meant by this?

>>717994482
Instead of looking at the endings from the perspective of how they deliver a happy ending, look at them by how they give you more knowledge concerning the game’s themes and how they explore them

>>717995279
SMT1 remake. Please God let it be so.

>>717995279
ATLUS WEST has gotten more 'funny' over the years, wouldn't be surprised if it's just a joke.
If it isn't and it's a stealth announcement of something good like II remaster/remake, I'll cum in my pants

>I'm 75% through on hard and just cannot take its bullshit anymore
Lemme guess... Noah?

>>717995407
>a happy ending
No, I wanted a delivering ending, and your character going Marvel Multiverse is shit

>>717990109 (OP)
I think you'd enjoy VV, 4 and 4 Apocalypse. Apocalypse on max difficulty is a very satisfying experience that feels minimum bullshit and maximum fun boss fights.

>>717995437
SMT duology remake

>>717995279
What >>717995514 said. It could just be a joke and not mean anything, or they will announce something randomly during the next week. I feel like they did something like this before but i can't remember what it was.

>>717993504
Kind of a bad faith argument in that the map of this one floor of the dungeon doesn't show you the elevations nor how you would actually navigate it. Meanwhile 4's dungeons are literally just flat hallways you can't deviate from. they're also about the size of one of these floors.

Keep in mind that I don't think the main dungeons of 5 are even half as good as the desert areas, but they're still a step up from 4. Fuck you can't even get maps of most of 4's dungeons because they're so simplified.

>>717990109 (OP)
>>717990252
Keep playing, Nocturne is great, and you can still enjoy Kazuma Kaneko character designs. I played both the original V and Vengeance (CoV only). They're great games but, somehow, feel a bit shallow compared to other SMT (Vengeance was an improvement, though) games, especially IV.
However, if you're considering PS2-era games, give Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 chance. They have an S-tier story and the game mechanics are great Play them back-to-back, as they're basically a single game divided into two because of production issues, they're about 25-30 hours each.

>>717998463
The problem with V's dungeons is that for having two dungeons both of them are fucking boring. Giant light hallway and giant dark hallway.
IV has shorter dungeons sure (though to say they're the size of one room is just lying for most of them) but they're much more interesting. Office space, and underground upside-down skyscraper, modern japanese temples, abandoned and repurposed military compounds. While I personally think SMT soul thrives when it's not a giant empty desert (see; SMT II), V still could have made their dungeons more interesting. Actually going through some of the ruined remains of Tokyo would have been cool, as some of it clearly remains intact, like the Diet Building.

>>717990109 (OP)
>on Hard
The huge boost to the compendum and magatama prices in shops makes the game boring when you either grind with the skills that give you stuff for walking on the world map or barely get to try out fusion and party setups. Even if you recruit every demon everytime you enter a new area you'll barely ever fuse anything new

>>717990109 (OP)
Don't play games, you sound like a zoomer pussy that can't do shit, oh and kill yourself for complaining, tiger striped faggot

>>717994056
you think you're tough? go ahead and beat this with no guide

>>717999240
>he needs a guide for a children's puzzle game

>>717990109 (OP)
It's actually pretty rewarding when you figure out a boss and the world building. This was the game that really made me believe that Nintendo fans truly hate Jrpg's. Mondomax calls it boring even though he plays Xenoblade Chronicles.

>>718001425
The first Xenoblade Chronicles is pretty good, it's the rest that sucks ass. I say this as a diehard SMT fan.
But that is true, the satisfaction of overcoming the challenges in SMT is really strong. It's basically the feeling you get after beating a good boss except you get it every few minutes, though I guess that depends on which game you're playing.

>>718001635
As an RPG, all 3 Xenoblades brutally mog the first one.

>>717990109 (OP)
>No grinding, my ass
congrats you actually played the game unlike majority of posers on this board